Blog Spam: A Review

Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular target for spammers. The existence of multiple vectors for spam injection, the potential of reaching many eyeballs with a single spam, and limited deployment of anti-spam technologies has led to a sustained increase in the volume and sophistication of attacks. This paper reviews the current state of spam in the blogosphere at large and in particular as seen at TypePad, a major hosted blog service. Furthermore the effectiveness of two popular open-source email antispam programs at classifying blog comment spam is evaluated. 1 Vectors Blogging tools provide a variety of ways to incorporate text on a blog and all of these are exploited by spammers. The first vector is the blog post, which may only be created by the blog owner or authorized delegates. These posts generally structure the narrative of the blog. Second is the comment, which is attached to a particular post and is generally only visible from the page dedicated to the post. Third is t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CEAS
• Authors: Adam Thomason
• Keywords: Blog, Blog Comment Spam, CEAS 2007, Internet Technology, Major Hosted Blog